Mechanics' Institute Chess Club Newsletter
#439

Vishy
[Anand] is a brilliant player. But it is very difficult to compete at 40. He is
up against people half his age. I will be surprised if he can go on any longer.
He can fight against anyone but time.

3) Louis Paulsen: “The Father of Hypermodern Chess”
by Imre König - Part I

4) He

re
and There

5)
Upcoming Events. Details below.

Don't forget the Far West Open in Reno this
weekend

1) Mechanics' Institute Chess Club News

Congratulations
to 17-year-old Sam Shankland who qualified for this past weekend for the US
Championship and will make the trip to Saint Louis with fellow MI member Josh
Friedel this May.

George
Sanguinetti solidified his newly recovered Expert's rating by winning the Walter
Lovegrove Senior Open this past weekend at the Mechanics' with a score of 3.5
from 5. Sanguinetti, who was rated an Expert for all of the 1990s - reaching as
high as 2175 - has been below 2000 for all of this decade until recently.
Finishing second in the small, but strong, field was Expert Larry Snyder with 3.
Top seed IM Walter Shipman, NM Keith Vickers and Class B player John Chan shared
third place but it was Chan that attracted the most attention defeating two A
players and holding Sanguinetti at bay for several hours before trying a
misguided winning attempt. Chan gained 77 rating points for his
efforts.

International
Master Walter Shipman, one of the great gentlemen of American chess, turns 80 on
April 18th.

Oleg
Shaknazarov defeated Igor Traub to grab the lead at the midway point of the
Spring Tuesday Night Marathon. A half point back at 3.5 from 4 are William Gray,
Hayk Manveleyan, Steven Krasnov and San Francisco teenager Evan Sandberg
who knocked off former SM Igor Margulis last night.

Congratulations
to the following Mechanics' members who were recently named to the 2009 Trophies
Plus All-America Team. The players are honored according to a formula based on
their age and rating. For example for players age 18 they must be a minimum of
2450 USCF.

Age
16 - Sam Shankland

Age
12 - Daniel Naroditsky and Greg Young

Age
10 - Yian Liou

Age
9 - Nicholas Nip

There
were 42 members named this year with over half coming from three states -
California with 8 and New York and Texas at 7 apiece.

San Francisco had several active
chess clubs right before the Civil War, including the Mechanics'
Institute. Here, William Schleiden, President of the German Chess Club,
San Francisco, does battle with the Hon. A. B. Meek, President of the
Mobile Chess Club, who was one of Morphy's early victims at the 1st American
Chess Congress.

A. Meek - W. Schleiden
[C39]

Offhand game,
29.09.1859

Played at the New York Chess Club September
29, 1859.

1.e4 e5 2.f4 exf4 3.Nf3 g5 4.h4 g4
5.Ne5 h5

This move is now considered inferior to5...Nf6 .

6.Bc4 Nh6 7.d4 d6
8.Nxf7

This sacrifice, which has first introduced
by Mr. Oliver, although it certainly gives the first player a very strong
attack, can scarcely be called sound. It is frequently made after the defense
has played ...Rh7 instead of ...Nh6, in which case there is more of a quid pro
quo.

"Meet
Me in St. Louis," says a smiling IM Sam Shankland, 17, from the San Francisco
suburb of Orinda, because that's where one of the new rising stars of the
American chess scene is heading to after winning the U.S. State Champion of
Champions title hosted online at the Internet Chess Club last Sunday.

In a pulsating East vs West finale to a week-long series of qualifiers
- that saw state champions from Alaska through California to Hawaii and from
Maine down to New York, Tennessee, North Carolina and Texas come together in a
unique online tournament - Shankland, the North California champion, beat
21-year-old NM Mackenzie Molner, the New Jersey champion, 3-2, after their match
went to the wire of a final armageddon decider to determine the final spot in
the 2009 U.S. Championship, hosted May 7-17 at the Scholastic Center and Chess
Club of St. Louis.

The past year has proved to be a big breakthrough one for Shankland.
His rating took a seismic leap from 2200 to over 2450 FIDE, he played in his
first U.S. Championship, achieved the International Master title, and tied for
first place and the bronze medal in the World Under 18 Championship in
Vietnam. Now, he's been crowned the "U.S. State Champion of Champions" and
will join an elite field of former U.S. Chess Champions in St. Louis that
includes Gata Kamsky, Hikaru Nakamura, Alexander Onischuk, Alexander Shabalov,
U.S. Hall of Famers Larry Christiansen and Joel Benjamin, and not forgetting
defending champion Yury Shulman.

3) Louis Paulsen : "The Father
of Hypermodern Chess" by Imre König - Part
1

The late Imre König
made his home in San Francisco from the early 1950s to around 1970. He was the
first International Master to grace the Bay Area with his presence and did much
to raise the level of chess culture in Northern California. He is perhaps best
known for his book Chess from Morphy to Botvinnik: A Century of Chess
Evolution which was published in 1950 and traced the development of such
classic openings as the Ruy Lopez and Queen's Gambit. Praised by many chess
aficionados from the chess historian and bookseller Fred Wilson to former
Candidate Kevin Spraggett, the book has gone through several editions, with
improbably enough the Dover paperback edition the hardest to find. One of the
openings not covered in Chess from Morphy to Botvinnik was the Sicilian
which König planned to cover in a successor volume. He never completed this
second work but he did write a series of articles that were first serialized
in
The Chess Correspondent and later The California Chess
Reporter.

Louis Paulsen:
“The Father of Hypermodern Chess”

By Imre
König

Part I

Would Nimzovitch turn in his
grave if he heard that the title he fought so hard to earn had been given to
Louis Paulsen, whose chess career pre-dated his own by more that half a century?
Paulsen’s career started with that of Paul Morphy, who beat him in a match in
1857. After that he slowly climbed to success, but never did he gain full
recognition and he was not even considered to belong to Steinitz “Modern
School.” Nimzovitch’s career started well before the first World War but it was
not until 1924 that Dr. Tartakover called him “The Father of Hypermodern Chess.”
Can this title be disputed by a man who lived long before him, and long before
the “Hypermodern School” was even thought of?

And how is it that Louis
Paulsen’s name remained so long in obscurity? It is because we still labor under
preconceived ideas, and in the beginning of his chess career – when the
“Romantic School” flourished – he stood apart, preferring defense to attack. He
did this when Morphy and Anderssen lived, when brilliant combinations and fierce
attack characterized the mode of play. The principles of modern chess had not
yet been laid down, and to be on the defensive meant to wait for the unexpected
onslaught. In Paulsen’s time a player who worked hard over the board to cope
with the problems of position in a game was considered the antithesis of a
genius. Paulsen therefore never recovered from the prejudice of his
contemporaries even after he became successful against Anderssen, with whom he
drew one match and from whom he later won two short ones.

Schools
of chess, to characterize a period of chess thought, are no new invention; and
when the “RomanticSchool” represented by Morphy and Anderssen was
superseded by the “ModernSchool” founded by William Steinitz, there
seemed a new chance for Louis Paulsen. Some of his opening ideas were at last
adopted – his defense to the King’s Gambit Accepted appeared to have dealt a
death blow to this most favored opening of those times. Yet all he gained was
the title “Master of Defense”; he still was not recognized as a founder of a new
school. Was it a consolation to him that even Steinitz was recognized only much
later after having a long unsuccessful fight for recognition? How could Paulsen
have expected to win fame when even Steinitz misjudged him? Not until 31 years
later did the latter pay tribute to Paulsen’s genius, when in his obituary of
Paulsen he wrote:

“Herr
Louis Paulsen was a genius of an order which is now becoming generally
recognized after having passed through the usual transition period of public
derision and depreciation. He was one of the chief pioneers of the modern school
which has been so much decried during its advance, but has established itself
victoriously after a hard struggle against a sort of sentimental opposition. So
far from my wishing to be intolerant against the adverse critics of the modern
principles, I freely beg to state that in the early part of my chess career I
myself was an absolute believer in the old system, and I well recollect that
when I first met Kolisch and Anderssen I expressed myself in very derogatory
terms about Paulsen’s style of play. But both those players warmly defended
Paulsen against my general criticism and this set me
thinking.”

Steinitz
at least gave posthumous credit to Paulsen’s pioneer work – but how about his
other contemporaries? Dr. Tarrasch paid tribute to his deep play but did not
recognize him as an inventor of new ideas in chess. The main inheritance left to
us is the Paulsen variation of the Sicilian Defense, but this was possible as
much the invention of his brother, Wilfred Paulsen, as it was his own. On the
other hand his contribution to the French Defense (1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.e5 c5 4.c3
Nc6) later adopted by Steinitz and Nimzovitch, has only lately been credited to
him by the resurrection of his old forgotten move 6.a3! -- giving new life to
this variation.

Time
passed; the “ModernSchool” too became obsolete; the “HypermodernSchool” arrived and in its turn was
transformed. Two world wars left their marks on chess and when a new
unprejudiced approach to the game came into being, the Russians announced the
birth of a new defense: The Boleslavsky Variation of the Sicilian Defense. Such
antipositional looking moves as 6. …, P-K4 had been played before but they were
usually refuted and no further attention was paid to them. This time, however,
Botvinnik came to the support of the move, calling it “one of Boleslavsky’s
shrewd opening inventions.” The fact that the move was played frequently by
Paulsen 50 years ago was forgotten. The Tarrasch-Louis Paulsen game, Breslau 1899 was published in Tarrasch’s 300
Schachpartien and is well know. It was perhaps thought that a single game
gave a player no right to claim authorship of the variation – but Paulsen
repeatedly adopted it with success, and that fact should have provoked some
thought.

Was
this variation a momentary impulse on the part of Louis Paulsen or was it the
outcome of a new approach to the openings? Steinitz may have given us the answer
when he wrote: “Morphy with all his mighty powers never ventured on a single
experiment in the early part of the game, and he faithfully followed the track
laid out by his predecessors. Paulsen, on the other hand, struck at the root of
the game in different openings, and in an original manner paved the way to the
development of principles in the middle game and in the ending which generated
position judgment and helped to dispense with mere combination
tactics.”

The
fact that these games were played between 1883 and 1889, all within six years,
should have indicated that during the last decade of his chess career Louis
Paulsen had arrived at conclusions on opening problems far ahead of his time and
if understood, these could have given rise to new opening thought. Alas, his
conclusions were not recognized and the chess world had to wait another fifty
years to catch up with such advanced thought.

Tarrasch
- Paulsen

Sicilian Boleslavsky B58

Breslau 1899

1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Nc3 Nf6 4.d4 cxd4 5.Nxd4 d6 6.Be2
e5

Tarrasch
remarked that this move created two bad weaknesses (on Black's d6 and d5) while
Botvinnik in commenting on his game against Boleslavsky (Sverdlovsk 1943) claimed
this to be one of Boleslavsky's shrewd opening innovations.

7.Nf3

Botvinnik
continued with 7.Nb3, followed by f4. Tarrasch considered the "natural" 7.Nf3
more effective, but even present day theory has not decided on the best move.
That Louis Paulsen was also prepared to meet 7.Nb3 is proved by the game
Gunsberg-Paulsen, Frankfurt 1887 which
continued 7...Be7! 8.Be3 0–0 9.g4 (quite modern, aiming at taking control of his
d5 square, this move has been analyzed lately.) 9...Be6 10.g5 Ne8 11.Rg1 Nc7
12.Nd5 Nb8!! 13.Qd2 Nxd5 (This explains Black's odd looking move 12...Nb8. Even
today it is considered preferable to exchange the Nd5 with a Knight to the
Bishop.) 14.exd5 Bf5 with the better game for Black. It is worth noting that
Paulsen realized that Black must either force the freeing move ...d5 or if
unable to do so because of the blockading Knight at d5, he must exchange this
piece. He prepared this in a masterly fashion dispensing with the move 7...h6,
which is unnecessary when the White Knight has retreated to b3, as 8.Bg5 is met
by 8...Nxe4. The exchange of the Knight on d5 is prepared by the unbiased
...Nb8!!, a move not unusual today but one showing a very advanced approach for
1887!

7...h6!

Now
necessary since, on 7...Be7, 8.Bg5 cannot be answered by 8...Nxe4, because of
9.Nxe4 and White's QB is adequately protected.

Tarrasch
praises this move which aims at preparing ...d5, and for a long time it was a
standard move. At present, however, it is considered better to defer it and
continue with 8...Be7 9.Re1 0–0 10.h3 a6 11.Bf1 b5 12.a3 (Now on 12.Nd5 Nxd5can follow. This is the idea of delaying the development of the Bishop.)
12...Bb7 13.b3 Rc8 14.Bb2 Rc7 15.Nb1 Qa8 16.Nbd2 Nd8 Unzicker-Taimanov,
Saltsjobaden 1952

According
to Tarrasch, stronger was 10.Bb5 followed by Ba4 and Bb3, to exert more
effective control on his d5 square. The idea of bringing the Bishop was tried
out by Stoltz against Boleslavsky in Groningen 1946, without success however.

10...0–0

10...d5
would have equalized the game.

11.Qd2 Ng4

Paulsen
wants to play a fighting game, believing that he will be able to force the
freeing move ...d5 later under more favorable conditions. Today this move is
considered too committal for Black.

12.Rad1 Nxe3 13.Qxe3 Qa5 14.a3 Qc5 15.Qd2 a6 16.b4 Qa7 17.Nd5
Bd8

Very
important. The Bishop must be preserved to guard the important d3 and b3
squares.

18.c4 Rc8 19.Qe3 b6!

Securing
the second rank for the Queen for free maneuvering and also covering the
weakness of the b6 square. Today we know that Black can afford to make such a
move as White has no Black Bishop to take advantage of it, but even much later
when Nimzovitch made such moves, he earned only derision.

20.Qd2 Qb7 21.h3Ne7

At
last Paulsen's fine strategy is manifest! White's strong Knight is driven away,
since Black threatens ...Nxd5 and after cxd5 Black's weakness on d6 would
disappear and the two Bishops would become effective.

22.Ne3!

An
effective reply.

22...Bc7

22...Qxe4
23.Qxd6 wins a pawn.

23.Bd3 Ng6 24.Nd5 Bd8 25.Kh2 Qd7!

Again
a fine move! Its significance will be seen in the sequel.

26.Qe3 Bxd5!

At
last Black has found the right moment for exchanging the Knight.

27.exd5

Now
White cannot retake the Knight with 27.cxd5 Rc3 28.Qd2 Rxa3 29.Qb2 Qa4 30.Ra1
Rb3 would give Black the advantage. This preparation of this maneuver by ...Qd7
shows what a master of positional play Paulsen was.

The
column appears safe for the moment but letters of support are most welcome
and should be sent by either e-mail: comics@washpost.com, phone:
202-3344775; or letter to Comics Feedback, The Washington Post, 1150 15th St.
NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.

The
website Chess Dryad (www.chessdryad.com), devoted exclusively
to California chess, has long been a template for how each state should preserve
its heritage with tens of thousands of games, thousands of photographs,
hundreds of articles and more. Now the Pacific Northwest ( Washington and
Oregon) has its own rapidly growing site at http://www.nwchess.com led by webmaster
Eric Holcumb and chief historical researcher Rusty Miller.